Years I'll Never Forget
by OfLoveAndLiterature
Summary: a look back in time at what the trinity girls could have been like in high school, complete au. mentions of master and swarto relationships but the main focus is on hartsquaredbig. originally written 30.05.14


_(Grace)_

 _Grace at seventeen is nobody. She blends into the hallways in high school, disappears into the wooden grooves of her desk. She's smart, she knows that. But deadly shy, head buried in science books and comics. She wishes for glasses to hide behind, feels like Clark Kent much more than Superman._

 _But then she meets_ Mamrie _, a beautiful blur of long red tresses, bold and confident always moving and joking and getting into trouble, and Hannah, with_ _her ripped jeans, blouse opened just a button too low and a loose tie around her neck that looks completely out of place._ Mamrie _has a sparkle in her eyes that means 'come play with me', smells like the wind, always has dirt under her fingernails. Hannah is funny in the completely unintentional way, clever, tries to talk her way out of everything, teachers can't help but love the both of them. And Grace, implausibly, does too._

 _Mamrie teaches her how to shoplift cigarettes. Has an old, rundown car that won't start some evenings, so they just sit in it until it does, wrapped in clouds of smoke, listening to mix tapes. Hannah touches her, whenever she's trying to make a point. A poke to the side, a hand on her arm, a casual bump against her shoulder._

 _Grace has to hide her blush every time._

…

Grace's hair turns grey in her early thirties. She dyes it at first out of some sense of misplaced vanity, but eventually grows to like the pale silver. She keeps it long and loose, fluttering around her shoulders.

She gets pregnant at thirty-two after a short affair with her boss at UCB. He breaks it off as soon as she tells him and hands her an envelope with two hundred dollars inside to get an abortion. She keeps the envelope in her coat pocket for days, thumbs the paper edges of it as she imagines stroking the ridges in a baby foot, tracing tiny toes with her lips. She keeps the money as she keeps the baby, hidden somewhere warm and secret, imagines it glowing as a fervent wish deep inside her.

Motherhood surprises her in its intensity, the deep warm meatiness of it, the milk leaking achingly from her breasts, the surges of hungry desire for this little thing that she's made.

She enjoys naming him Luke after Star Wars and having no one to contradict her.

…

 _She becomes daring. Huge, when they're all together. They climb the fence of the school's soccer field after hours, smoke pot on the grass, giggle over nothing. Everything is bright, so clear:_

 _The scrunch of Hannah's button nose as she giggles at something_ Mamrie _said._

 _The flash of Mamrie's arm as she ties her hair back with a practised move. She forgets a strand or two, and they move softly in the breeze. Grace reaches out her hand, and twirls one around her finger. Mamrie smiles warmly, and presses her lips to the inside of Grace's wrist._

 _Hannah moves behind her, and Grace can feel the soft press of her breasts. She shivers._

…

At forty, Grace's stomach is softer, her breasts lower, her hips wider. She traces her skin in bed at night, carefully catalogues the body that pregnancy and life left her, and tries to imagine someone loving her ever again. She can't.

Sometimes, she still dreams, arches with pleasure against soft curves, traces long hair, kisses parted lips. It's always two bodies next to her instead of one.

…

 _(Hannah)_

 _Hannah at fifteen already knows she prefers girls but tries to make up for it by fucking a handful of grateful, bedazzled boys first. A teacher once, too. They do absolutely nothing for her so she systematically seduces them, kisses them, lets them slobber all over her, come in warm spurts against her thigh, and then drops them. She doesn't care about the reputation that earns her, doesn't care about much of anything. Until Grace, who is a senior and stunningly beautiful but doesn't know it yet (will never know it). Until_ _Mamrie, who's irresistible, who both dares and completes her._

 _Once she figures out how to masturbate she spends countless hours in her bed, on the bathroom floor, even in the school toilets, fantasising about them. Fervently pushing her fingers inside herself, filling up some ache, shivering and flushing in turn as if she has a fever. It feels like dreaming._

 _It's because of her, in the end, that they're a tangle of heavy limbs on a sunny soccer field. Because of her courage and lips, finding_ Mamrie's _, then Grace's, and Hannah has never felt more real in her life than between the two of them, trading heated kisses._

…

Hannah studies English lit in college. The first year she has a professor who likes to glance down her blouse, or accidentally touch her ass as she walks by. He teaches a class on how men in stories make their own fate, while women are defined by their children, their mothers, their lovers. Hannah writes a detailed essay on all the reasons why he is a chauvinist pig and gets expelled.

She changes her major to women's studies.

She meets Sarah years later, at a party. Sarah's a high-profile lawyer, hates kids, wants the career and she's nothing like either Grace or Mamrie were, so Hannah goes down on her an hour later in the garden's hot tub and greedily listens to this perfect, composed woman beg. They move into a San Francisco loft after a month, adopt an ailing cat from a shelter, and then another, because they're never home and one cat gets lonely. It works well, for a long time.

…

 _Hannah touches Grace, under a blanket on the old couch in Mamrie's dad's garage. Her heart is hammering in her chest while she traces Grace's stomach, then the line of her panties. Mamrie is pasted to Grace's side and they're kissing languidly, noses nudging against cheekbones. Grace's hand is pressed between Mamrie's jeans-clad thighs, and when Hannah's fingers finally inch under her waistband, Grace twists and looks at her in surprise. She's wet, slippery down there and very warm and Hannah rubs her fingers around, gets used to the feeling, slowly pressing one finger inside while Grace bites her lower lip, hard._

 _It's completely quiet but for the sound of them moving. Hannah feels swelteringly adult, meeting Mamrie's eyes and seeing her nervousness reflected there, sweat pearling up on the side of her face and in the creases of her knees. Her hand starts to cramp up by the time Grace makes an "oh" sound and, as by accident, trembles into an orgasm._

 _She tries Mamrie next._

…

Hannah fills out a bit throughout the years, changes from the hipless beanpole she was in high school into a curvier middle-age. She keeps her hair short and shaves the sides of her head, it's cool now apparently. She can still rock a suit if she feels like it but usually just opts for the shirt and tie look. Her fondness for ties hasn't changed one bit. At thirty-eight Sarah leaves her for an organic farmer and in a secret, vindictive part of her mind Hannah is relieved, because Sarah was never it at all. She couldn't be.

She writes a self-deprecating stand-up routine about it, steps onto a free podium in a small lesbo bar and brings down the house. Within the year she leaves her well-paid job at an NGO to do stand-up full-time. One day she hears Grace's name in relation to UCB and surprises herself with the flash of longing she feels at that, the thought of Grace on a stage somewhere as well. She wonders if Mamrie is with her.

…

 _(Mamrie)_

 _Mamrie at sixteen is all curves and bumps and extra skin that she doesn't want. She's not_ big _though, she just needs to lay off the chocolate milkshakes for a while. She's extremely self-deprecating towards her own body but at the same time, she fucking owns it. She doesn't let anyone know that she's ashamed of her figure in any way, shape or form. If anyone even tries to call her out on her size she's not afraid to tell them exactly where to go._

 _She is the much-appreciated girl after four older brothers, and even after her belly starts cramping vindictively one day and she bleeds through her school uniform skirt, she doesn't feel very female._

 _Mamrie feels constantly distracted by Hannah and Grace, gets obsessed with the smallest details. Grace licking her lips. The minuscule hairs on Hannah's forearm, and how they rise up as she gets touched. The obscene beauty of their bare legs tangled under a table. The shadow of Grace's nipples under her white shirt, and the way Mamrie's allowed to touch them, trace them through the fabric while Grace breathes quick, moist breaths into the side of her neck and then pulls her into a kiss._

 _Every night she takes off her clothes in a dark bathroom, ignores the mirror and presses her naked self against the cold tiles of the wall. It sends a shiver through her whole body, points her nipples to the point of pain, and she imagines them on the other side, doing the same._

…

Mamrie never goes to college. She works in an Applebee's for a year or so, then shocks her parents by moving out to the city to try acting. She ends up working in a bar, where she meets a waiter named Chester with a nice smile and a nicer cock. Twenty years later they're married and have three kids and a mortgage and a mini-van and she never intended this, she thinks. Every choice feels as if it made sense, at the time. As if it was the right thing to do. But now, looking back, she hates herself for every single one of them because she could have had so much more.

Mamrie is thin now, even after three kids, she turned vegan when she fell a couple months pregnant with their first child. Little Anthony. Thinking back, she wishes she'd been vegan all her life. That documentary really fucked her up. Her shoulders have stooped a little and her stomach is a mess of scars. Her feet have grown ugly after years of working in heels, and she has wrinkles around her eyes. Chester is a decent man, she thinks, but then that's all she can manage to think about him. He doesn't live inside her body, he doesn't thrill her, shake her, no memories of him make her breath catch. She wants to leave him.

…

 _The pale skin between Hannah's thighs tastes like salt._

 _It's a week before the school year ends and they're leaving each other. Hannah's panties are bunched up on Grace's bedroom floor, there's wetness spread over Mamrie's cheeks and nose and fingers and hair, and her tongue is getting numb. Hannah is draped over the bed with Grace licking her breasts, she groans and tenses her back. The light catches her glistening upper thighs, trembling stomach, and her muscles move in some complicated dance under Mamrie's talented tongue as she comes._

 _Mamrie feels like a warrior._

 _Later both Grace and Hannah catch her as she falls. More and more._

…

And it's silly but after two decades those memories still hit her with a dark heat, burning in her stomach. Desire. Shame too, for longing after two women that are probably nothing at all like her now.

It's all about choices, Mamrie feels, and she tries to accept the past, day after day.

Until one day she thinks "fuck it" and goes to rummage through an old box that has a booklet with phone numbers written in faded orange and red.

She tracks down Grace's parents, then Hannah's sister.

They meet in the middle.


End file.
